The Dark Room
Authors: Minette Walters
| The Dark Room |
| Minette Walters |
| 1994 : UK |
For Colleen
and
in memory of my father
And we forget because we must
And not because we will.
Matthew Arnold, ‘Absence’
The idea of the false self was put forward by R. D. Laing,
adapting some theories of Jean-Paul Sartre. The false self was an artificially created self-image designed to concur with expectations, while the true self remained hidden and protected.
Brian Masters,
Killing for Company
Prologue
WITH HER SHARP
little face set in lines of dissatisfaction, the twelve-year-old girl sat up and searched for her knickers among the forest
leaves. It had finally begun to dawn on her that sex with Bobby Franklyn wasn’t all it could be. She put on her shoes and kicked him hard. ‘Get up, Bobby,’ she snapped.
‘It’s your turn to find the bloody dog.’
He rolled over on to his back. ‘In a minute,’ he muttered sleepily.
‘No,
now
. Mum’ll skin me alive if Rex gets home before me again. She’s not stupid, you know.’ She stood up and dug the heel of her shoe into his naked
thigh, twisting it back and forth in a childish desire to hurt. ‘Get up.’
‘OK, OK.’ He rose sulkily to his feet, tugging at his trousers. ‘But this is pissing me off, you know. It’s hardly worth doing if we have to go looking for
the dog every time.’
She moved away from him. ‘It’s not Rex that makes it hardly worth doing.’ There were tears of angry humiliation in her eyes. ‘I should have listened to Mum.
She always says it takes a real man to do it properly.’
‘Yeah, well,’ he said, zipping his fly, ‘it’d be a damn sight easier if I didn’t have to pretend you were Julia Roberts. What would your sodding Mum
know about it, anyway? It’s years since anyone gave her a good shagging.’ He had few feelings for these girls beyond the purely animal, but he grew to hate them very quickly when they
gave him lip about his performance. The urge to smash their jeering little faces in was becoming irresistible.
The girl started to walk away. ‘I
hate
you, Bobby. I really
hate
you, and I’m going to tell on you.’ She tapped her watch. ‘Three minutes.
That’s as long as you can keep it up. Three lousy minutes. Is that what you call a good shagging?’ She gave a triumphant glance over her shoulder, saw something in his face that alerted
her to the danger she was in, and took to her heels in sudden fear. ‘
REX
!’ she screamed. ‘
RE-EX
! He’ll
kill
you if you touch me,’
she sobbed, her small wiry body darting through the trees.
But it was Bobby who was going to do the killing. His anger was out of control. He threw himself at her back and brought her crashing to the ground, breathing heavily as he tried to
get astride her thrashing legs. ‘Bitch!’ he grunted. ‘Bloody bitch!’
Fear lent her strength. She scrambled away from him, crying for her dog, slithering and sliding in a flurry of decomposing leaves into a broad ditch that scored the forest bed. She
landed on her feet, only yards from the huge Alsatian, who stood, hackles up and growling. ‘I’ll set him on you, and he’ll rip you to pieces. And I won’t care, and I
won’t stop him.’ She saw with satisfaction that Bobby had turned white to the gills. ‘You’re such a
CREEP
!’ she yelled.
And then she saw that Rex was growling at her and not at Bobby, and that what had drained the colour from her boyfriend’s face was not his fear of the dog but stunned horror at
what the dog was guarding. She had a glimpse of something half-unearthed and repulsively human, before panic drove her up the slope again in sobbing, wide-eyed terror.
Chapter One
SHE CLUNG TO
sleep tenaciously, wrapped in beguiling dreams. It was explained to her afterwards that they weren’t dreams
at all, only reality breaking through the days of confusion as she rose from deep unconsciousness to full awareness, but she found that difficult to accept. Reality was too depressing to give birth
to such contentment. Her awakening was painful. They propped her on pillows and she caught glimpses of herself from time to time in the dressing-table mirror, a waxen-faced effigy with shaven head
and bandaged eye –
hardly recognizable
– and she had an instinctive desire to withdraw from it and leave it to play its part alone.
It wasn’t her
. A huge bear of a
man with close-cropped hair and close-cropped beard leant over her and told her she’d been in a car accident. But he didn’t tell her where or when. You’re a lucky young woman, he
said. She remembered that. Forgot everything else. She had a sense of time passing, of people talking to her, but she preferred to drowse in sleep where dreams beguiled.
She was aware. She saw. She heard. And she felt safe with the pleasant female voices that smoothed and soothed and petted. She answered them in her head but never out loud, for she
clung to the spurious protection of intellectual absence. ‘Are you with us today?’ the nurses asked, pressing their faces up to hers.
I’ve been with you all along
.
‘Here’s your mother to see you, dear.’
I don’t have a mother. I have a stepmother
. ‘Come on, love, your eyes are open. We know you can hear us, so when are you
going to talk to us?’
When I’m ready . . . when I’m ready . . . when I want to remember . . .
Chapter Two
SHE AWOKE ONE
night with fear sucking the breath from her lungs. She opened her eyes and strained them into the blackness. She
was in a dark room –
her dark room?
– and she wasn’t alone. Someone –
something?
– prowled the shadows beyond her vision.
WHAT?
Fear . . . fear . . .
FEAR
. . .
She sat bolt upright, sweat pouring down her back, screams issuing in a tumult of sound from her gaping mouth.
Light flooded the room. Comfort came in the shape of a woman’s soft breasts, strong arms and sweet voice. ‘There, there, Jane. It’s all right. Come on, love, calm
down. You had a nightmare.’
But she knew that was wrong.
Her terror was real. There was something in the dark room with her
. ‘My name’s Jinx,’ she whispered. ‘I’m a
photographer, and this isn’t my room.’ She laid her shaven head against the starched white uniform and knew the bitterness of defeat. There would be no more sweet dreams. ‘Where
am I?’ she asked. ‘Who are you? Why am I here?’
‘You’re in the Nightingale Clinic in Salisbury,’ said the nurse, ‘and I’m Sister Gordon. You were in a car accident, but you’re safe now.
Let’s see if we can get you back to sleep again.’
Jinx allowed herself to be tucked back under the sheets by a firm pair of hands. ‘You won’t turn the light off, will you?’ she begged. ‘I can’t see in
the dark.’
Query prosecution of
Miss J. Kingsley /driving
with 150mg per 100ml
Date:
22 June, 1994
From:
Sergeant Geoff Halliwell
Miss Kingsley was thrown from her vehicle before it impacted against a concrete stanchion in one corner of the airfield. She was unconscious when
she was found at 21.45 on Monday, 13 June, by Mr Andrew Wilson and Miss Jenny Ragg. Miss Kingsley suffered severe concussion and bruising/laceration of her arms and face when she was thrown from
the car. She remained unconscious for three days and was very confused when she finally came round. She has no recollection of the accident and claims not to know why she was at the airfield. Blood
samples taken at 00.23 (14.6.94) show 150mg per 100ml. Two empty wine bottles were recovered from the floor of the car when it was examined the following day.
PCs Gregg and Hardy had one brief interview with Miss Kingsley shortly after she regained consciousness, but she was too confused to tell them
anything other than that she appeared to believe it was Saturday, 4 June, (i.e. some 9 days
before
the incident on 13.6.94) and that she was on her
way from London to Hampshire. Since the interview (5 days) she has remained dazed and uncommunicative and visits have been suspended on the advice of her doctors. They have diagnosed post-traumatic
amnesia, following concussion. Her parents report that she spent the week 4–10 June with them (though Miss Kingsley clearly has no memory of this) before returning to Richmond on the evening
of Friday, 10 June, following a telephone call. They describe her as being in good spirits and looking forward to her forthcoming wedding on 2 July. She was expected at work on Monday, 13 June, but
did not show. She runs her own photographic studio in Pimlico and her employees say they were concerned at her non-appearance. They left several messages on her answerphone on the 13th but received
no reply.